Seven Lava Jato agents resign in protest against the Attorney General's Office

Seven of the prosecutors in the anti-corruption operation Lava Jato, which uncovered a vast corruption scheme at Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras, resigned from their posts on Wednesday because of differences with the policies of the attorney general's office. 

In a joint document sent to that body, the seven prosecutors, who are part of the Lava Jato team in São Paulo, presented their collective resignation due to "unsolvable incompatibilities with the actions of Viviane de Oliveira," who was appointed by attorney general Augusto Aras to coordinate the work in that city.

Aras, appointed to the post by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at the beginning of last year, has been critical of the Lava Jato, of which he hinted a few weeks ago that it had committed "excesses" during its investigations, which in recent years led to the imprisonment of influential politicians and businessmen. 

The attorney general particularly attacked the methods of the prosecutors of Curitiba, the nerve centre of the Lava Jato, whom he accused of keeping "a box of secrets" with "50,000 documents" under the most complete "opacity". 

"It is time to correct the course so that 'lavatism' does not continue," Aras said in a video conference with lawyers last July, in which he said during his term he would seek to put an end to the "punitive" image of the Public Prosecutor's Office. 

The mass resignation of São Paulo's prosecutors was announced a day after the resignation of Lava Jato chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, who attributed his decision to family issues, but who in recent weeks also maintained a stand-off with Aras. 

From the beginning of the operation, in 2014, Dallagnol led the group of prosecutors devoted exclusively to the Lava Jato cases, and worked side by side on these matters with the then judge Sergio Moro, who in 2019 took over the Ministry of Justice from Bolsonaro and resigned last April at odds with the ruler. 

As a judge, Moro handed down some of the harshest and most controversial sentences in that whole process, such as the one that sentenced former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to prison, in a trial in which he was accused of acting "impartially" and with "political ends".